The NAACP chapter distanced itself from Sterling after gossip website TMZ released a recording of Sterling using racial language in a conversation with his mistress. The NBA has voted to ban Sterling and wants him to sell the team.

Sharpton has his own history of racial controversy, including false accusations in the racially charged Tawana Brawley case, inciting anti-Jewish mobs in New York in the early 1990s, and fanning racial outrage in the Trayvon Marin case.

This guy should pay more attention to the little voice inside his head that says “Maybe that’s not a good idea.”

A South African performance artist who tied a live rooster to his penis during an impromptu open-air show near the Eiffel Tower was found guilty yesterday of “sexual exhibitionism”. However the Paris court did not impose a sentence.

Last September Steven Cohen danced on the French capital’s Trocadero Plaza dressed in a corset, high heels, long red gloves and an elaborate feathered headdress with a rooster attached to his penis by a ribbon.

Under the amused and perplexed gaze of tourists, including a group of nuns, the spectacle lasted only a few moments before police arrested Mr Cohen, dragging him across the plaza, rooster attached.

Outnumbered and fighting off wave after jihadist wave, Americans were left to die in Benghazi while administration officials huddled, not to devise a rescue strategy, but to spin the election-year politics. The most powerful and capable armed forces in the history of the world idled, looking not to their commander-in-chief but to a State Department that busied itself writing press releases about phantom Islamophobia. The president of the United States, the only constitutional official responsible for responding, was nowhere to be found.